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[Note: The following news and opinions primarily came from email sent by our friends. Thank you Sirius and all the others who have forwarded these messages to us. Due to the large volume of email we are receiving, we can only post a sampling here, but we thank everyone for sending stories like this. We read them all and post what we can as time permits.]

The Dominion of Death (Nurit Peled-Elhanan)
“The story in the Israeli (and American) media is one of Arab murderers and Israeli victims, whose only sin was that they asked for seven days of grace. . . . But anyone who can remember back not even one year but just one week or several hours knows the story is different, that each attack is a link in a chain of horrific bloody events that extends back 34 years and has but one cause: a brutal occupation. . . . It strengthens my belief that all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, are victims of politicians who gamble the lives of our children on games of honour and prestige. To them, children are worth less than roulette chips. . . . In the kingdom of death Israeli children lie beside Palestinian children, soldiers of the occupying army beside suicide bombers, and no one remembers who was David and who was Goliath, for they have faced the sober truth and realized that they were cheated and lied to, that politicians without feeling or conscience gambled away their lives as they continue to gamble with the lives of us all. We have given them the power, through democratic elections, to turn our home into an arena of neverending murder. Only if we stop them can we return to a normal life in this place, and then death will have no dominion.”

The war they wanted (Alexander Cockburn, Creators Syndicate, 12-06-01)
“Write ‘FINIS’ to all efforts across the past 35 years to secure a just settlement in Israel and some measure of satisfaction for Palestinian aspirations. . . . There are those in Israel who outlined clearly a couple of weeks ago Sharon's plan to force matters exactly along the lines they have now taken. . . . The respective leaderships of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas came to the understanding that it would be better not to play into Israel's hands by mass attacks on its population centers. . . . In other words, Arafat had managed to convince Hamas to curb its suicide bombers. This understanding was shattered by the assassination of Abu Hunud. ‘Whoever decided upon the liquidation of Abu Hunud,’ Fishman continued, ‘knew in advance that that would be the price. The subject was extensively discussed both by Israel's military echelon and its political one, before it was decided to carry out the liquidation. Now, the security bodies assume that Hamas will embark on a concerted effort to carry out suicide bombings, and preparations are made accordingly’. . . . Consequently, the prime task of the Israeli government and of its supporters here has been to turn back any serious pressure for accommodation with even the most modest of Palestinian demands. In parallel, the faction mustered around Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle has been to push for the United States to reopen direct hostilities with Iraq and settle accounts with Saddam Hussein, once and for all. . . . The Wolfowitz-Perle group knows perfectly well that any serious new confrontation with Saddam Hussein would probably be a prolonged and bloody affair. There is no Northern Alliance ready and eager for U.S. intervention in Iraq. . . . These are the stakes. They're far larger than the present tragi-comic efforts to assemble a coalition to run Afghanistan, and there isn't much sign thus far that President Bush understands that comic-book advisories such as ‘You're for us or against us’ do not, in this situation, really apply.”

U.S. News Blackout
Where no news is good news (Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, December 5, 2001)
“A poll conducted last week in the United States by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press found that 80% of people felt that censorship of the news from Afghanistan was a ‘good idea’. . . . ‘Ask anybody who only watches CNN and network news how many civilians have been killed and I don't think anyone knows that,’ said Stephen Rohde, the president of the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union at a debate on private rights versus public security last week. . . . He said that he felt that the media was now an area of American life that has been affected on the civil liberty front by the war. . . . a growing number of American commentators are expressing disquiet at what they feel is a lack of information which the media may deem in some way harmful or unpatriotic. . . . Fox News Channel, the conservative channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, makes no pretence at objectivity in its coverage. . . . One of its news anchors, Brit Hume, told the New York Times that the network did not give too much weight to reports about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and said to NYT reporter Jim Rutenberg: ‘War is hell, people die. We know we're at war. The fact that some people are dying, is that really news? And is it news to be treated in a semi-straight-faced way? I think not.’ ”

War and Peace and Gurdjieff (Adrian G Gilbert)
‘The conversation began with my question: ‘Can war be stopped?’ And G. answered: ‘Yes it can.’ And yet I had been certain from previous talks that he would answer: ‘No, it cannot.’ . . . ‘But the whole thing is: How?’ he said. ‘It is necessary to know a great deal in order to understand that. What is war? It is the result of planetary influences. Somewhere up there two or three planets have approached too near to each other; tension results. Have you noticed how, if a man passes quite close to you on a narrow pavement, you become all tense? The same tension takes place between planets. For them it lasts, perhaps, a second or two. But here, on the earth, people begin to slaughter one another, and they go on slaughtering for maybe for several years. It seems to them at the time that they hate one another; or that perhaps they have to slaughter each other for some exalted purpose; or that they must defend somebody or something and that it is a very noble thing to do; or something else of the same kind. They fail to realise to what extent they are mere pawns in the game. They think they signify something; they think they can move about as they like; they think they can decide to do this or that. But in reality all of their movements, all their actions, are the results of planetary influences. And they themselves signify literally nothing. Then the Moon plays a big part in this. But we will speak about the moon separately. Only it must be understood that neither Emperor Wilhelm, nor generals, nor ministers, not parliaments, signify anything. Everything that happens on a big scale is governed from outside, and governed either by accidental combinations of influences or by general cosmic laws.’’[Copyright P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, pp.23-24, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1950]

Hiding Past And Present Presidencies: The Problems With Bush's Executive Order Burying Presidential Records (John Dean)
“On November 1, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13233, a policy enabling his administration to govern in secrecy. . . . The Order ends 27 years of Congressional and judicial efforts to make presidential papers and records publicly available. In issuing it, the president not only has pushed his lawmaking powers beyond their limits, but he may be making the same mistakes as Richard Nixon. . . . The Executive Order suggests that President Bush not only does not want Americans to know what he is doing, but he also does not want to worry that historians and others will someday find out. Certainly that is the implicit message in his new effort to preclude public access to presidential papers -- his, and those of all presidents since the Reagan-Bush administration. There is, however, no justification whatsoever for this latest effort to hide the work of past, present, and future presidents. . . . What appears to have provoked President Bush's action is the fact that some 68,000 documents from the Reagan presidency were waiting at the White House when Bush arrived, ready for release by the National Archives. . . .
These documents passed the twelve-year deadline for public release on January 12, 2001, but their release has been stalled by the Bush White House until now. The documents are believed to contain records that Papa Bush, as Reagan's vice president, is not happy to have made public. They also contain papers of others now working for Bush, who might be embarrassed by their release. . . . If President Bush continues with his Nixon-style secrecy, I suspect voters will give him a Nixon-style vote of no confidence come 2004. While secrecy is necessary to fight a war, it is not necessary to run the country. I can assure you from firsthand experience that a president acting secretly usually does not have the best interest of Americans in mind. It is his own personal interest that is on his mind instead.”

Blasting Our Way to Peace ― The West's ‘victory’ is a defeat for civilisation (George Monbiot, The Guardian 15 November 2001)
“But almost everyone now agrees that this is the end of history, all over again. The sceptics have been routed as swiftly as the Taliban. George Bush and Tony Blair, with the help of their ‘daisy cutters’ and cluster bombs, have ushered in a new, new world order, the long awaited golden age of democracy. But have the warriors of the West, both actual and virtual, really won? And if so, what precisely is the prize? . . . Will it free the world from terrorism? No. Will it deliver regional or global security? Probably not. . . . But, as well as asking what this war has done to Asia, we must also ask what it has done to us. And here, it seems to me, the bugles sounding victory for civilised values are also sounding retreat. . . . The first and most obvious loss is our willing repudiation of the very basis of civilisation: human rights. The new terrorism bills in America and Britain have required the suspension of both the US constitution and the UK's human rights act. . . . One of the last smart bombs deployed in Kabul destroyed the offices of Al Jazeera, the only truly independent major television station in the Arab world. Al Jazeera has consistently provided a voice for Muslims opposed to US military intervention in Afghanistan, as well as airing Bin Laden's inflammatory videos. A few weeks ago Colin Powell sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to close it down, without success. Its destruction suggests that free speech and dissent have now joined terrorism as the business of ‘evil-doers’. . . . Justice in war, as almost every philosopher since Thomas Aquinas agrees, requires that the peaceful alternatives should first have been exhausted. There is plenty to suggest that the initial aim ― to capture Bin Laden ― could have been achieved without recourse to arms. . . . If this is a victory for civilisation, I would hate to see what defeat looks like.”

America’s Terrorist Training Camp ― What's the difference between Al Qaeda and Fort Benning? (George Monbiot, The Guardian 30 October 2001)
“ ‘If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents,’ George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, ‘they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.’ I'm glad he said ‘any government’, as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention. . . . For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at Al-Qaeda's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government. . . . [The School of the Americas] graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven ex-pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year a SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its graduates from Colombia than from any other country. . . . We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the Al-Qaeda training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the ‘evil-doers’ in Fort Benning, Georgia?”

[Editorial Note: The School of the Americas has been recently renamed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). See the School of the Americas Watch website for details.

Unfinished Business (Paul Harris and Gaby Hinsliff in London, Ed Vulliamy in New York, Peter Beaumont in Quetta, Jason Burke in Jalalabad, The Guardian, December 9, 2001)
“With the fall of Kandahar the war in Afghanistan is practically over. A few Taliban guerrillas will probably fight it out in the mountains, and foreign al-Qaeda fighters may be even more determined to make a stand. After all, they have nowhere to run. . . . Yet the war is not finished. From the start, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have talked of the long haul. That talk has not diminished. As the generals and politicians relish their victory and savour their first sweet taste of vengeance, the implications of the Afghan campaign are just beginning to become clear. The victory at Kandahar, negotiated by Karzai and won by American bombs, has marked the beginning, not the end, of the ‘war on terror’. And it will be a war like no other the world has seen. . . . This new war is combat waged from the air and directed from the ground. It is not a war fought with battles, it does not have front lines, nor does it have marches or invasions. It is a war where men - or women - seated thousands of miles away can track the enemy’s every move and then destroy them with a few strokes of a keyboard. It is a war where a whole country can be put under intense surveillance without being occupied, where no enemy is safe to set foot outdoors for fear of the rocket-armed spies in the sky. It is twenty-first-century war, served up American-style. . . . In attacking the Taliban the US has not come to close to dealing al-Qaeda a mortal blow. US weapons are like none the world has seen, but neither is the enemy. Al-Qaeda does not need tanks, camps or artillery, or planes or missiles. It does not seek to capture territory or invade America. As much as the Predator drones, the al-Qaeda fighter also has revolutionised the face of war. This is a whole new world. . . . The terrorist hunters face huge difficulties. In the slums of Asian cities, in the refugee camps of Palestine and the madrassas of the Arab world, al-Qaeda is fighting its battles in the minds of its converts. That is not an enemy that can be defeated by bombs and rockets, no matter how well targeted. As the suicidal pilots of 11 September showed, al-Qaeda’s main weapon is the will to attack. And that will is not in short supply.”

John Ashcroft: American Fascist (WillPitt.com)
“In his opening remarks, Ashcroft made the following statement: ‘To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists - for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.’ . . . There is no plainer way to say it - this is rank demagoguery of a strain so pure that it has not been heard in the political dialogue of this nation since the dark days when Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy made careers out of shattering innocent lives during highly publicized anti-communist Congressional hearings in the 1950s. . . . In essence, John Ashcroft claims that if you question the unprecedented steps he and his Justice Department are taking, if you voice doubts about the concept of destroying freedom in order to save it, if you step out of the narrow line being drawn by he and Mr. Bush, you are a terrorist. If you dare to participate in that most fundamental American activity - dissent - you are aiding and abetting the murderous butchers who sent thousands of our citizens to death three months ago. . . . Patriotic Americans will now fear to speak out against the government, the first fundamental responsibility of any citizen, for fear of an accusation that will taint them forever. It is intimidation in the raw of the first principle - the right to speak your mind, and to defy authority when it has gone awry. . . . It comes to this: At the bottom, America is an idea, one represented and defended by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Amendments listed above. Destroy the idea and you have destroyed the nation. If we are to believe the hyperbole of the administration, those who attacked us on September 11th did so because they despise our freedoms. To destroy those freedoms in response to the attack is tantamount to surrender.”

‘Anarchy’ leaves 1m without food, humanitarian crisis (Imre Karacs in Berlin, The Independent, 09 December 2001)
“International aid agencies are warning that more than a million destitute Afghans are beyond their reach and face death from starvation and disease. Conditions are worst not in regions still being fought over, but in areas firmly under Northern Alliance control. . . . More than seven million people out of an estimated population of 22 million are classified by aid organisations as being at "very high risk". Most eke out a living in areas captured by the Northern Alliance in the first days of its offensive. . . . Mr Fisher says only about 3.5 to four million out of the five million or so people needing urgent help in the northern belt "are accessible at the moment". Overall, he reckons that between a third and half the country is out of reach at any one time.”

Who's the Medieval Barbarian? Taliban Marijuana Policy vs. US Marijuana Policy (DRCNet.org)
‘According to a review of the Taliban penal code by New York Times reporter Amy Waldman, Article 6 of the penal code specifies the following penalty for pot-growing: ‘A person who cultivates marijuana will be jailed until his family members get rid of the plant.’ . . . Such punishment may sound draconian to enlightened societies, but it is positively benign compared with the United States. Under federal law, growing one plant can net you 15 to 21 months in prison and a fine of up to $1,000,000. For more than one hundred plants, you're looking at a five-year mandatory minimum sentence and up to 40 years maximum.”

Why did police arrest 734,498 pot-smokers, instead of tracking murderous terrorists? (Libertarian Party Press Release)
“American law enforcement is guilty of something close to ‘criminal neglect’ for arresting 734,498 people for marijuana violations last year―instead of investigating and stopping murderous terrorists, the Libertarian Party said today. . . . ‘Thousands of innocent Americans may be dead because law enforcement considered it more important to raid college frat parties and arrest people for smoking marijuana than to find and stop the deadly terrorist ‘sleeper’ cells that were plotting the greatest mass murder in American history,’ said Steve Dasbach, the party's national director. . . . Of the almost three-quarters of a million people arrested in 2000, approximately 88%―or about 646,042 individuals―were charged only with possession of marijuana. . . . ‘Local and state police, the FBI, and federal law enforcement agencies have only a finite amount of people, time, and money to investigate and stop crimes,’ he noted. ‘By directing so many of those resources to the War on Marijuana, law enforcement made the ill-advised decision that detecting murderous, fanatical terrorists was less important than arresting non-violent Americans who choose to use marijuana.’ ”

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